Ross Bleckner was born in New York City in 1949 and studied with Sol LeWitt and Chuck Close at NYU. His work would remain rooted in the intensity of New York experiences throughout his career, confronting loss, mortality, memory, and change. The 1965 MoMA exhibition, The Responsive Eye, had a profound influence on him as an artist. The show brought Op Art onto the cultural landscape, presenting dazzling and entrancing abstract compositions within the bastion of modern art. The impact of those vibrating patterns is evident in Bleckner’s work.
Bleckner created immersive, large-scale paintings that elicit a powerful and hypnotic dizzying effect, exploring perception – visual and emotional. In this 2007 painting, West to East, layers of organic forms blur into a grey background. A contemporary and friend of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, and Peter Halley, Ross Bleckner belongs to an artistic generation that returned painterly technique to the canvas. He was one of the youngest artists to be featured at the Guggenheim, receiving a major retrospective at there in 1995. His work is held in major museums including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as well as MoMA and the Whitney in his home city of New York.